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Product Placement in Video Games
klaun writes: "Yahoo has a Reuters article about product placement in games. Seems that paid placements are no longer that popular because they don't work. The audience is to sensitive to advertisement being 'crammed down their throat.' Wonder what slashdot thinks of product placement." I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game.
I was playing Super Monkey Ball (extremely fun) for the GameCube the other day...
and I got this strange desire for a Dole Banana. Wonder if it was something subliminal thrown in...
It's a very unintrusive form of advertising. I don't see anything wrong with it. It doesn't take away from the game, or perhaps make it more real. I'd rather that than interrupt the game with ads like is becoming the trend on the internet to interrupt viewing of a webpage to show an ad. In a world where ads are being made more and more intrusive and more annoying, this is a refreshing way to advertise a product.
Jack Buck (1924-2002)
Darryl Kile (1968-2002)
It does help to make movies and games more realistic, since they will be using brands that you recognize, but that's about all it has ever done for me.
Besides, unless there is something that limits someone from using a certain product in a movie, it's pretty much going to happen anyway, why pay for it? (I might be wrong here, but you don't have pay Pepsi if you want to film a movie and there is a guy in a scene drinking Pepsi, do you?)
What?
THPS2 (not sure about 3) has product placement in just about every category possible - branded skateboards, ramps, ads on walls (some real, some spoof), and the PSX version even had a demo for a different game on-disc. Most of it's fine, unlike the Pizza Hut ad in the second Ninja Turtles game on NES, which just seemed out of place.
It's about time that ad companies start realizing that they are forcing so much at us, that it doesn't work anymore. (Redundant, I know).
Still though, maybe they'll start finding better ways. First of all, the product really does have to appeal to the target audience. It has to make sense. I don't even notice ads anymore, they are just automatically blocked out of my vision.
Occasionally, one that appeals to me in some way will surface. Like one I saw on slashdot a while back that asked what the smallest positive integer you could make with 9 9s and + - / * ( ) was. That grabbed my attention right there, but hey, I'm a programmer.
On the other hand, most ads (read: X10) are totally ignored by me, and I don't even give it a second thought when my mouse automatically moves over and closes the window.
and Pizza Hut. I still have the instruction book with the coupon on it. I challenge anyone to find a video game with advertisements in it older than that. I'm not sure if the ads worked then or not, but it was a wildly popular game.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I was a little peeved at the presence of blatant promotions for Soap shoes in the game Sonic Adventure 2. Sonicteam kind of represented an independent spirit, despite the often shameless marketing of their mascot, and it kind of saddened me to see them tie the little blue guy to yet another way for preteens to injure themselves.
It's fun looking for the ads-- real and fake-- in SA2, though. "Got Ring?"
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
That's the plain and simple fact of it. As a culture, we are so used to ignoring any form of advertising, that it just doesn't register anymore.
Advertising is in a state of diminishing returns, and they need to go about it a different way.
I thought that Hateful Chris 3d trailer was funny...
"The earth is running critically low on ad space!"
I've noticed on two XBox games, Project Gotham Racing and NFL Fever 2002 have fairly visible Taco Bell "ads". NFL Fever having the end of game Taco Bell highlight reel, and PGR having a few signs in NYC that say Taco Bell. I don't have any problem with it. Its a detail that if completely absent would draw some attention too... I mean think of the BCS for college football. I remember when each bowl didn't have a sponsor like the Tostito's Fiesta Bowl... Fed Ex... etc. Sponsorship is a part of our everyday lives... Does it mean I've gone to Taco Bell since their XBox media blitz started... Nope. Although a soft taco supreme sounds kinda good right now...
BTW... This post sponsored by JohnChapin.NET
Ever since playing Max Payne, I've had the urge to buy a .50 caliber armalite automatic rifle and shoot
the people who cross me...I guess this product placement
stuff works.
Oh well...time to go buy some doritos, because i AM bold and daring enough!
Did any of you play games on 15 years ago? Going to Pizza Hut instead of "the pizza place" does help you relate to the game more. It makes it easier to relate to the character.
My partner found the article at work the other day, it was interesting. Before he even mentioned the part about promotions my first thought was promotional deals.
Sure Dole isn't paying for the US rights, but why should Sega spend money removing it. The Dole stuff was amusing and SO over-the-top it didn't even seem like a game, it was funny. I couldn't stop laughing about the Dole stuff everywhere.
I don't buy bananas on brand, so it's irrelevant, but if they were launching a luxury version, it makes sense to do promotional deals.
Alex
The second kind of advertisements is product placement that does not fit stylistically into the game. An example would be if the cut scenes in Final Fantasy showed the characters wearing Fubu clothing and swilling Cherry Coke. This sort of product placement makes one feel that advertising is being 'crammed down one\'s throat', and is thus not acceptable to many gamers. As long as companies can differentiate between the two types-- and avoid the latter-- everything will be okay.
I also have a related question: What's the deal with the car brands in Gran Turismo? Do the car companies pay to have their products "featured" in the game, does the game company pay for the rights to use real cars, or does no money change hands?
Thanks for your time.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I was thinking about this just the other day when I got the DVD of 2001 for my birthday.
....Entertainment industry experts say the days of searching the screen for sotto voce references to a brand name are over.
Looking online I found this interesting essay on the movie in which it discusses briefly product placement at a time when it wasn't as rampant a phenomenon. Also, this article from Reuters, Product Placement Blatant Not Subtle in Films was interesting; it covers both movies and video games, and how the entertainment industry moved from simple product placement to strategic marketing. Quoting from this:
The new world in entertainment marketing leaps out of the screen into the world the audience inhabits, traveling under intriguing titles such as viral marketing, street marketing and wild posting.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Product placement is usually accepted where it doesn't interfere with the product in which it is placed. James Bond driving a BMW is fine, and might even boost BMW's image. The camera focusing on the BMW logo on James' car is not.
So, for example, if there were going to be cans of soda int he game anyway, like in Deus Ex, there shouldn't be any objection to putting a real-world brand name on them.
Yeah, you bring up the opposite of product placement: the jarring moment (similar to all movie and TV phone numbers starting with 555) when a product is so obviously fake that it pulls you completely out of the 'reality' of the moment.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Besides funding, product placement can add realism to a game. We're immersed in product placement in real life, so it seems strange to not see it in a supposedly reality-based game.
Of course, in real life we see competing brands advertised all the time, but that wouldn't happen in a game. You won't see both Coke and Pepsi billboards in one game any time soon. Furthermore, games usually have just a handful of sponsors - sometimes even just one. The Illusion is somewhat broken if all you see in a game are Nike ads and nothing else.
But the most common offense I see is when they put in ads for their own company or development team. Sure it was funny maybe a few years ago, but I don't want to see giant ads for Interplay, Inc. or "Team Blue" in every game I play. (Note to developers: this also goes for pictures of your family and obscure in-jokes that only Bob will find hilarous.)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
i have to say i've been really rather impressed recently by the adverts in gta3... they really do help to build up that living city feel. and the radio ads blatently rock.
though i think the best use of product placement in a game has to go to wipeout 2097 and its use of red bull... that just fitted so perfectly to me... am i right in saying that was done with no cash changing hands too?
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As the AC said, Red Bull.
And since it was in Wipeout XL, I thought Red Bull was this badass futuristic drink (which I could never find at the time.) Now it seems like Red Bull has this cheesey marketing campaign where it "gives you wings". Heh, yeah, I think it's silly. Especially where I first heard about the drink.
Recent games I see ads (I'm not too sure about ads) was FHM, Eyewire, (and a few more I can't recall off the top of my head) in Metal Gear Solid 2.
It's been mentioned that Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 has Jeeb and Nokia adverts.
And I remember playing a few more games on PS with ads, but I can't remember where.
The radio stations in Grand Theft Auto III really help make the game and the ads really help make the radio stations work. They add to the "texture" of the game and give the game makers the ability to make subtle (and funny) commentaries on society.
The wierd thing is that MOST of the ads are fake... but some of the personal promotions stuff (Game Radio) are real or are they... the bleed over between the fake ads and reality adds another dimension to the game.
This article also shows that if you ignore ads THEY WILL STOP. If you don't like ads complain and specifically do not buy those products.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
I sit in front of my webcam drinking Dr. Pepper all day. Thousands of visitors see me drinking Dr. Pepper every month. But do you think Dr. Pepper has ever even ONCE offered to sponsor me??? NO! Of course not.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
If Red Bull pays a lot of money to have theur adds in WipeOut and other games i would expect that the developers could reduce the price. But no they ofcourse increse the price and calls the adds a "feature" that increases the gameplay
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
propstoalldedhomiez: It's a very unintrusive form of advertising. I don't see anything wrong with it. It doesn't take away from the game, or perhaps make it more real.
... i really dont like paying for something then having to view advertisements.
gimpboy:
I'm with gimpboy on this one. If I paid for it, I expect to be able to put my entire attention into the experience I paid for. If an ad enhances that experience, i.e. by creating a more realistic environment or being parodied as part of a plot line, it's acceptable. But if it's intrusive, it's just stolen my time and vandalized my property, just as if someone had spraypainted it on the side of my house.
As near as I can tell, if it's intrusive enough to actually sell the product, it's also gone over the line into degrading the experience, whether movie or video game. So that ruins product placement as a legitimate advertising technique, with the possible exception of joke-as-plot-element.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I liked the subtle realism of having a brand name laptop recognizable in the game. Walking in to one of the rooms and seeing a ThinkPad X series laptop was pretty cool.
Without product placement I never would have known about petsovernight.com.
Rush Rush to me Yao!
I kind of liked the advertisements in the GT games. It added a sort of authentic feel to the game. They weren't shoved in front of your face, either, they were tucked nicely out of the way on passing billboards.
The only serious problem with this is when the marketing execs find that people start shooting up the ads that they don't like, they'll try and force the game companies to make thier ads invulnerable to enemy fire. That's cheating!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
But for some reason, all of a sudden, after reading this article, I wanna go home and fire up my Atari 2600 emulator.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Damn... Extortion! Why didn't I think of that.
I've been approching this all wrong. Yes. A month long campaign to threaten to switch brands if I'm not offered a sponsorship.
I'll get started on that right away!
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
"so long as they fit the context of the game"
The product should fit the context of the game - and not the advertisement... I can just imagine it, walking through some Half-Life clone, collecting a red key, pulling a lever on the wall of a darkened corridor, wading through demon-hordes to get the blue key, and finally opening that last door to reveal a message saying:
"Trouble shifting those nasty bloodstains on your Quake armour? Tired of cleaning the guts off your marine uniform? Then try NEW WonderClene*TM spray on your clothes! Just two squirts and you're back in the action! *contains bleach"
That would be the wrong kinda realism for me.
insignificant sig
btw... here are some articles regarding the subject that you should read:
Product placement in games
Placing Product Before Art
One, it's a rip of a Henry Ford quote. 'You can have a car in whatever color you want, as long as it's black.'
Two, I've said similar things at parties, usually when I had bought $60 in Corona or Heineken for everyone else at a BYOB party and didn't want them touching my Stoli or Grolsch. Mostly along the line of 'Dude, go for one of those Heinies, that's all that's in there.'
Mebbe a little tacky, but not that outlandish either.
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I used to work for a compay called Cricinfo, and in the database of registered users, there was a field about how those users came to the site. There were a significant number that specified they'd heard about the site from playing one of the cricket games on computer.. It seemed to work very nicely for them. :)
You can't even possibly be considering comparing NPR and /. are you?
If you are serious, then I'll say the obligatory 'you must be new here'.
If you're joking, then I'll say: damn, that's really one of the funniest things I've read here lately.
SQ4..I think. Can't remember. Anywho, gets my vote for best real PP, and best fake. The real one was Sprint; all of the transporters in the game used Sprint as a carrier. It was funny. The fake one was for Soylent Clear. Nice jingle. Look for it on google.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
James Bond driving a BMW is fine, and might even boost BMW's image. The camera focusing on the BMW logo on James' car is not.
You must love early Jacky Chan movies then...all those moments where a Mitsubishi logo fills the screen and someone offhandedly mentions how fantastic their car is.
I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game.
I thought it was cool that, in Metal Gear Solid 2, you could pick up copies of FHM magazine and leave them in strategic places to distract guards.
What I wish they had done is to leave some White Castle hamburgers laying around. If Snake eats them, he loses some health and gets bad gas, which naturally alerts the guards to his presence.
Oh well, there's always MGS3 to look forward to.
Steve
I find that product placement in games is terrific. To play off of another post I saw here, a gentleman was commenting on how he didn't enjoy seeing advertisements for the company that produces the game, or family photos, etc. Ten times out of ten, I'll want to see "Pepsi" on the side of a can in the game than I would "SUPERCOLA." Intelligent product placement makes the game much more believable, and doesn't launch me out of the otherwise serious nature of the game with "Supercola? wtf?"
Take Max Payne for instance; a game that I find fairly realistic. If the painkillers were all "Advil" or "Tylenol" or something, I would find that tasteful and I would prefer it over "Painkillers."
I'd say that everybody wins in that situation. The advertising company gets some cheap (and probably well-noticed) advertising, the software company gets some extra cash in their pockets, and the end player gets some added realism.
I think tastefulness is the key issue here, and I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that "SUPERCOLA" takes me way out of the illusion that the game publishers are trying to embed me in.
I agree it was funny. The mod must have been on cheaper-than-usual crack.
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Then how is advertising over two pages in a magazine (and filling it up with crappy brochures), posters or even neon light installations the size of buildings, TV-advertising, telemarketing, and, the latest fashion, pop up ads, not? If it's worth advertising on some poster on a wall, why isn't it worth advertising on a Wall in virtual reality? You know the audience that will come by, nobody will mess up the poster, or alter it in creative ways, and you even get to choose the place and surroundings of that advert.
If it were no good idea to advertise there, where you at least know the audience, then maybe the whole concept of advertising should be reconsidered. I think brand recognition is greatly underestimated, if those corporations are concerned about how, and in which context their products are displayed. Did anyone ever notice how many of those rich evil movie drug-dealer types cruise around in those big black Mercedes or BMW? And that gave those cars a bad rap? Not that i'd notice.
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Its historically pretty messed up. You'd think they'd be paying us to place their logos -- but in practice we (game developers) have had to pay for the right to use the logo. Thats slowly changing, though. Its harder in things like stadiums. Usually the agreement states something along the lines of we can't go placing random things. We have to approach the real owner of each logo -- and if they disagree, we can't place a competitors logo in its place.
itself, rather than the advertisements. However, it
is possible to put ads in games without making them
annoying.
The first thing that should never, ever, ever be done
is to make the whole game an ad for something.
In the old days of the NES, there were TONS of crappy
games produced that were basically ads. There was
a game featuring the "Noid" mascot for Dominoes Pizza. There was also a game centered around McDonalds, Seven Up, and plenty of other stuff,
IIRC.
I guess the next worse thing is to make a game that
is crappy, but with a popular theme, in order to
stick ads in it. Examples of this are the games
that starred Shaq and Jordan which were not basketball games. Not surprisingly, Pepsi ads were crammed into Shaq-Fu.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
"I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game."
GranTurismo is about the Grand Touring racing industry. The advertising is how they keep the sport alive. The game is filled with advertisements, even the cars are modeled after real cars and have the stickers from the real advertisers. I've always thought it gave the game a hightened sense of reality and wondered if the original spooncer had something to do with game funding. Apparently not (after a little research) but it still makes you wonder how much money they (Sony) could make if they had chosen to charge some nominal fee for advertisements in the game.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Being an Australian, I played Wipeout way before Red Bull was promoted here. So it looked like a made up sponsor for the game, and I wondered why the game promoted a pretend product so heavily. I thought that maybe it was some kind of in joke. Of course, it made sense once I knew what Red Bull was :)
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Real advertisements in games that are attempting to simulate reality, seems like a boon to me. And if helps pay the bills for the game maker, more power to them.
:-); in games, where the viewpoints are less well defined, and user controlled, I think it's a lot harder to compromise the game's value.
:-)
And dynamically changing ads would actually ad more interest to the game. I think it'd be cool to be distracted momentarily by a new interesting ad, and become someone else's frag due to the distraction. Hah!
I find it hard to see the down side. In movies, I think there's a far greater likelihood of compromising the creator's artistic integrity (when each shot starts with a well-framed shot of a Pepsi can
Whenver the ads rolover, I'd be just like Homer when all the new billboard's come out. Might even end up joining a clown college because of it. "Dooo doo doo do do do do doooo doo dooo dooo"...
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well I for one am an example of successful product placement in a videogame. Back when WipeoutXL for the original PlayStation first came out, on several of the tracks (and I think on the intro movies) I kept seeing "billboard" ads for something called Red Bull. (By then, of course, Red Bull was well established in Europe, and WipeoutXL was produced by Sony's U.K. unit, Psygnosis). So when I saw it in the store, I bought one just to see what it was. And I still drink the occassional bottle. So it can work.
People expect ads. This bugs me. But you can have fun with it.
There's someone who takes photographs of cities and removes all the ads in Photoshop, then prints them up as artworks. The effect is striking.
There's a set of anti-commercialism games at Global Arcade:
I have a financial web site that has a banner ad on it, just to make it look more "commercial". It just didn't look right without ads. It's a fake banner ad for Adbusters. Few people have ever noticed.
I also have a fake site for last years's "AI" game, full of fake ads. (About time to pull the plug on that one; the game sites themselves just went down, now that worldwide release of the movie is complete.) It looks more realistic that way.
Tracking the effectiveness of advertising in normal media (print, outdoor, broadcast, etc.) is a well-established science. For novel media like video games and the like I don't see how they can collect enough measurable data to reliably dismiss the media as a profitable advertising venue.
As an example, in 1986 electronic punk band Sigue Sigue Sputnik decided to sell advertising on their album 'Flaunt It'. Yes, there are actually commercials between some of the songs!
It was a bold and brash move, but well executed. The ads and products (Studio Line hair gel, i-D Magazine, etc.) fit in well with the overall style of the album, and there were some fake ads as well that were humorous and flowed well with the album.
It's easy to measure how many copies were sold (bootlegging aside), but how do you measure the actual number of effective exposures per album, or the time frame? Personally, to this day I still use exclusively Studio Line, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it's because they had the balls to advertise on one of my favorite albums. No doubt I'm an outlier, but how do you quantify the success of a single advertisement that's still moving product >16 years after it ran?
As another example, my first exposure to Red Bull was while playing Wipeout XL on the Playstation, almost 2 years before I ever saw the product on store shelves. I freaked when I realized that it was a real drink, and immediately picked some up (good stuff!). Again, it's hard to measure the longevity of new advertising forms.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Actually, there is a company Isher Artifacts which makes some really *fine* looking energy weapons.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It would be nice if more people did "fake" product placements to crowd out real brands, like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith making up Red Apple and Nails brand cigarettes, respectively. Or most of the brands in the Simpsons universe.
"Grand Theft Auto" brought to you by Ford!
Survey says, "BZZZZZZZZZZZZT"!
;)
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
I've said for years that ads have a place in games. Games are very costly (with good reason, costly to develop, you know). I think that publishing companies and dev houses are loosing some of their target audience to piracy, due to the prohibitive costs of the latest and greatest games. Boys aged 12 to 25 usually have limited funds to spend on games. When those kids get older, whether they have the cash or not, they are so used to not paying and so used to ignoring ip laws that they might continue a life of crime (in casual piracy).
/., and sometimes I turn off the tv altogether. I don't know anyone who actually watches ads on any other day except the Super Bowl. My mother only watches recorded tv, so she never sees commercials. I see a lot more ads on the web than on tv, which brings me to another point entirely.
Now, ads have their time and place in video games. It wouldn't be right to see an "Enjoy Coke" sign just before you confront the Butcher in Diablo. In games like Deus Ex, Max Payne, and Grand Theft Auto, however, it's natural to include billboards and other types of adverts. Such endeavors add (no pun intended) atmosphere to games that already strive to become more realistic and involving.
We've seen ads in some games, but they are usually for other games by the same companies. (Sega seemed to be pretty keen on this idea a few years ago with their racing games, but I believe that it has kind of fizzled out.) Sports games are very good candidates for advertising. What two things go together better than professional sports and blatent commercialism? EA, for example, strives to make the play its sports titles more like sports produced for television. If I could get a free (or cheap) legal copy of NHL 2002, I could put up with commercials between periods. This is a game that has tv camera angles, color (annoying) commentary, realistic breaks between faceoffs, and puck highlighting extremely similar to network television. Why not go to the next step? Some of those ads could have spokespeople of the digital versions of actual Hockey players. Games are a niche market, you have a young male demographic to target. This makes advertising easy. Knowing the gender and age of 97 percent of your audience can enable more specialized ads and ultimately reach a larger percentage of them. (Ads starring Britney Spears could reach millions.)
There are a few problems with this. People will get very tired of the ads that come with the game by default. Users could be prompted every so often to download the new ads from the web site. Still, there's a problem. Advertisers who may have pulled their advertising for one reason or another will still be running on unpatched software, and new advertisers won't get the ads displayed which they have payed for. I suppose that this could be measured in downloads, and the advertisers could pay when a month is over and the usage statistics were in. Downloads could also determine payment for the original advertisers, which would be good for them, but not so good for the gaming company. When advertisers pay for television ads, they can never be sure how many viewers there will be, so they could spend a million dollars on an ad that will never be seen. Developers need to be paid, though, and the odds are that there won't be 2 million downloads (or orders or whatever) in the first 3 weeks. Another problem would be that this would keep the developers pretty darn busy in the months following a game release. This is time that could be better spent on new titles. Fortunately, if this proved popular, advertising agencies and/or the companies they represent would begin to hire professionals that could produce the commercials and sent to the game's publishing company to be inserted where they are needed. These ads would be much less costly than tv ads to write and develop (unless they used conventional tools, such as cameras and video). This brings up another problem. With the thousands of 3d engines out there, these directors and developers would have to develop in the same engine that the game is in (again, unless it's video). Moreover, they would have to learn new level designers and programs for mostly every game out there. Publishers, however, could provide them with the tools necessary (the ones the dev houses are using) early in production so that the ads could be ready by the time the game goes gold. As this becomes more common, a better plan might be to write 3d engines that support models and animations from animation programs, such as Lightwave, Maya, 3dsmax, SoftImage, or even Blender (yay for free!). Most engines support these one way or another, since there has to be a way to model for the game in the first place. Also, of course, you could do animations and put them as video in the game, but that's a wussy solution. (I think that should've been more than one paragraph.)
Gamers decidedly opposed to ads in games could still pay their 50 bucks for non-ad versions. This would not be hard for commercials or billboard ads. For commercials, just remove them. Just take them out altogether (or if you want to be weird, give the users an option to disable them and to skip ones they don't want to see with the spacebar). For billboard and neon signs and the like, just replace the ad textures within the game packages with "Eat at Joe's" and other fake ads. (Note: In the cheap or free versions of these games, you would have to put some sort of protection on these files to prevent people from creating mods that disable the ads. You'd have to tell the engine to always take these ads over any others. You also might have to put some sort of protection on the actual packages to prevent people from getting in there and actually changing those files. You might put those in a separate, protected package, but that could easily be deleted or replaced. You could put them within the actual executables or something, but then they would be really hard to replace if you wanted or needed to. The best solution I can come up with right now (5AM) is to put them in their own protected package within the main game package. Passwords might work, but some sort of encryption would be much better. Neither of those would be foolproof, but they would keep out the casual cracker and people like me who would try for 2 1/2 minutes and then forget what they were doing. You might think of something better that would keep out almost everyone, but I am certainly not the person to ask about anti-piracy measures, unless of course you want to bypass them.)
In regards to ads and product placement not working, fuck that. They work as well as any ad does. When commercials come on tv, I don't pay attention. Sometimes I leave the room, sometimes I talk to people, sometimes I just get on
I see so many ad-supported sites going down because of revenues being down. I think that advertisers have it all wrong. Web ads are measured in clicks. That's all wrong, Cat. On the rare occasions that I do see tv ads, even if I like the ad, I don't immediately want to turn to the all-Charmin Network (or whatever product is being sold). The same goes for web sites. Just because I see an ad, doesn't mean that I immediately want to cease my current task and go to the web site for the product they are selling. Maybe if there was a checkmark beside every ad that said, "I see this ad and acknowledge it's existence." That way, bastard companies would know that I saw their ad, but it wasn't interesting enough to click on.
kill $(pidof -x Rant); *
At any rate, I see ads in video games because that's where I am most of the time. Nobody pays attention to ads anymore, no matter where they are. I don't even see pop-up ads anymore. Ctrl-Q (or Alt-F4) helps me with that. Advertising is a part of capitalism. I hope to see it progress into the video game market. Advertisers just need to learn how to use video games to their advantage. It'll keep costs down, but not punish the developers who (usually)deserve every penny of the money they do get.
P.S. I want to say that keeping the costs down of some genres and not others seems a bit wrong. It would be a shame for the FPS players to pay a lot less money for games than MMORPG fans do. This is the major hole in my arguement. I don't know how to knock it down, other than saying, "Well, they'll just have to figure out how to advertise or lower their prices." Please post or send me any suggestions about how to make this go away. You can also do it if you disagree with everything I say. Please do.
*My linux install totally fucked itself the other day, so I can't check my syntax. Don't yell if it's wrong.
procinfo | grep Rant | awk '(print $13)' | kill
pidof Rant | kill
I thought about using those, too, but they may not be right, either.
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. --Aristotle
. James Bond driving a BMW is fine ;)
no, no its not. For so many reasons the mind boggles!
however I do agree with your point.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
0 = ((-((((-(9-9))/9)/9)/9)-9)/9)*9+9
...
...
1 = (-(-((9)*9)-9-9)-9+9-9)/9-9
2 = ((-((((((-(9+9))/9)/9)/9)*9)*9))/9)*9
snip snip
39 = (-((-(9+9)-9-9)*9-9-9-9))/9
40 = -((-(9+9)-9-9)/9-9)+9+9+9
41 not found in the set.
I'd post the Perl program, but Slashdot doesn't like code for some reason. It basically used a huge hash, using the result as a key and the formula that generated that result as the value, selectively overwriting existing key/value pairs.
I imagine the Lisp solution is more elegant, but I haven't got around to learning Lisp.
When your in a game, your usually to busy firing your weapon, or running for the next health, to view advertising, unles sits done in such a creative way the everybody stops playing the game to view the ad.
In a movie, there is time when the character are just talking, so people may actually notice the product placement ad.
Perhpas a pop up ad during everquest combat would work, for about a month.
Now a TV ad, that makes use of cross genra advertising might work, like "Drink Coke, frag more!" or the got milk an trix ads, those where genious.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Except in the British release of Demolition Man, when all restaurants are Pizza Hut. No Taco Bell in England, you see.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
I think that happens because a) the studio already has a lot of Macs lying around and b) the Mac OS is probably the easiest for setting up the sort of quick animations and multimedia crap that's usually happening on a movie computer.